With the program installed, Facebook users can display product photos and descriptions. “Referrals drive a huge part of the economy in the real world and the Internet enables networks of friends to be leveraged in a whole new way,” Alvarez told the E-Commerce Times. Still, social networking has the potential to change the online retail game, especially when it comes to peer-to-peer sales such as those that dominate the eBay platform, said Gartner analyst Gene Alvarez. In fact, as eBay has grown, particularly through international expansion, rivals such as Amazon and Yahoo have shrunk or shut down their auction offerings. Many online companies have taken runs at eBay over the years, most without putting a dent in the company’s stranglehold on the Internet auction market. Buy.com will not charge a listing fee and charges a flat fee of 5 percent of the final sale price. “We see tremendous growth opportunities in providing the millions of users on business and social networks with an alternative to eBay and the ability to transform their personal profile pages beyond information-sharing.”įacebook users sign up and download the Garage Sale program to their profile home page, where they can list items for sale. He described the so-called “embedded e-commerce” approach as the first of its kind. “Garage Sale allows consumers to become personal online retailers,” said Buy.com CEO Neel Grover. However, anyone interested in buying from those auction listings must do so through eBay.īuy.com hopes cutting out the middle man, and eliminating auction listings fees, will pay off in the form of eBay buyers and sellers turning to social networks to conduct their transactions. The service aims to capitalize on the fact that many eBay users maintain profiles on popular sites such as Facebook and MySpace, often referencing their auction listings from those pages. Through Garage Sale, users can post items for sale and buyers can complete transactions from a user’s profile page. The Internet retailer said its service would be immediately available to users of Facebook and would be rolled out for other social networking platforms in the future. Hoping to use social networking to compete with auction giant eBay, Buy.com on Tuesday launched Garage Sale, a service that lets users sell goods and services from within their home pages on sites such as Facebook.
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